I am experiencing a strange issue with a project that I am not sure what is the cause of. As soon as the project is open, the SSD storage space is gradually consumed until it is full. Once the editor is closed the space is freed again so I know it is something to do with the editor. This is incredibly annoying as I have about 20GB free space which is consumed within 10 minutes meaning my whole PC will crash or slow to a stutter as the PC has literally no free space on the drive.
I assume the editor is writing or storing some temporary information. I have looked around online and seen some suggestions such as maybe the editor log, which I’ve checked and it is not that. Is there any way to debug what this could be or any common occurrences of such an issue?
well you coulld use any of the microsoft what used to be sysinternals to monitor what files are being made, but, chewing through 20gb sounds excessive, if i downloaded all my assets from the asset store (of which i have a stupidly large collection of) sure, easy, but i have to tell it to do that, if i just open the editor and “do nothing” little has changed because well nothing is happening. The location of log files etc is well documented, plus, unitys location and where your projects are are under your control. tbh you you would need to see where the space is going.
That sounds like a rogue script that continuously logs messages at a very fast rate. But as the post above, I suggest figuring out what files are taking up the space.
Figured it out for anyone who encounters a similar issue. The file taking up space was the windows page file drastically increasing to accommodate virtual memory for the editor. Basically, my SSD remaining space wasn’t enough to accomade the size of the virtual ram the editor needed. I had about 15gb on my SSD free and the editor would eat that all up trying to create a 20gb+ page file for virtual RAM. I cleared some space and now it stops consuming space after about 15-20GBs used.
Not sure why the editor needs so much virtual memory, I would assume probably as this is a relatively big project (100gb plus), but freeing up space managed to solve the issue.
Well that would depend on the spec of your machine and what is in your project, if you load some hella big meshes and textures sure… if your machine has 4gb memory… id expect it to chew page file then… for example
That is nothing! Don’t work on a disk that’s THIS full. Even more so if it’s the disk that also has the operating system on it. More more so if that operating system happens to be called Windows. As you learned already, the main reason is the swap/paging file.
And even more so if the disk is a SSD. The reason here is that nearly-full SSDs wear out a lot faster due to write operations occuring more often on the same memory cells. Normally the SSD controller distributes write operations across as many cells as possible but with a nearly full disk, it has little space to stretch out write operations. And finally, some SSDs suffer a performance penalty when they’re over 80-90% full.
16GB RAM in my case. The project is big but doesn’t consume all the actual ram, not even half, it just goes to consuming it all on a massive page file for some reason. No idea why as page files and how OS (Windows) handles memory is beyond the scope of my tech knowledge. Nevertheless, it works with more space freed up fortunately.